Technical State of Civil War

Mark A. Ashwill Commentary, , , ,

This is a repost of a Facebook post by Robert Hawks, who lives in Michigan City, Indiana. I know it’s long, all 3,387 words and 14 minutes, but it’s so worth it. Trust me. So turn off the TV, mute your phone, grab a drink of choice, and start reading. Read it to the end and answer his question: “Am I lying”?

The truth can hurt, but it can also be funny as hell. I see nothing but truth in Mr. Hawks’ musings and predictions. And some black humor.

On a personal note, I’m happy to see my home state, the first state, the corporate state, the DuPont state, and a border state during the Civil War, in the blue. 😀

Scroll to the bottom to hear two versions of a piece inspired by this essay.

Peace, MAA

Let’s dispense with the pleasantries.

We are at war.

Not a shooting war.

Not yet.

But something worse in its own quiet, choking way—a technical state of civil war. The kind of war that makes cowards of rules and turns procedure into shrapnel.

And in Texas, Greg Abbott is lighting the fuse.

On August 4th, Governor Abbott announced—proudly, defiantly—that any Democratic legislator who fails to appear for a surprise session of the Texas state legislature by August 5th will see their seat declared vacant.

This, in a bald attempt to force a quorum for an unscheduled redistricting effort that would gerrymander at least five new Republican congressional seats into existence.

Five seats.

Bought not with votes, but with ink and knives.

Five seats to hold the U.S. House hostage after a 2026 election that, by all current indicators, will be a biblical catastrophe for the Republican Party.

This is not about state politics.

This is not about Texas.

This is about power.

This is about permanently tipping the balance of national representation using the architecture of a dying republic to rig the new one being born behind its back.

It is a dagger aimed at the heart of the Constitution itself—and it is being sheathed in plain sight.

Governor Gavin Newsom of California has responded in kind.

So have the governors of Illinois, Washington, New York.

They’ve declared their own intent to redraw maps, to counterbalance Abbott’s theft with a theft of their own.

And just like that, the pretense is gone.

The guardrails are being sawed off by both sides.

The game is rigged, the referees have joined the teams, and the field is splitting down the middle.

We are not drifting toward civil war.

We are being carried there—on gurneys, on motorcades, in armored trucks painted red, white, and blue and driven by men with no conscience and nothing left to lose.

Donald Trump—the increasingly frail, increasingly unhinged re-occupant of the Oval Office—has shattered the last illusions of presidential restraint.

His executive orders openly violate the Constitution.

He appoints judges who have lied under oath and dares the courts to stop him.

Senate Republicans, now functionally extinct as an institution of deliberation, confirm them without even pretending to vet.

Trump has begun personally selecting general officers in the U.S. military.

He is choosing his own warlords.

This is no longer political theatre.

This is war prep. This is banana republic shit.

And the punchline?

Half the country still thinks the Democrats are overreacting.

That we’re all just melting down because we lost a few court cases or that we’re mad we can’t get pronouns printed on our napkins.

No.

We’re reacting because we’re watching the United States be turned inside out by men who believe they should rule forever—or not at all.

Let’s be brutally clear.

This is not just about maps.

Not just about Abbott.

This is about a Republican Party that has now publicly declared—yes, publicly, and repeatedly—that if a Democrat wins the presidency in 2028, they will refuse to certify the election.

Full stop.

That’s not politics. That’s war-by-other-means.

The plan is as clear as it is insane: gerrymander the House, win the majority through rigged maps, then throw the 2028 election to the chamber when no consensus can be reached.

Install a Republican president—possibly Trump, God help us—by congressional fiat, regardless of the Electoral College or the popular vote.

In other words: end elections.

Cement minority rule.

Burn the scaffolding of democracy and salt the earth where the ballots used to grow.

And here’s where we land.

If one side openly declares they will never accept a Democrat in power again—and backs that declaration with action—then the only rational, ethical, and self-defensive response is to make the same declaration in return.

That’s how we arrive at a technical state of civil war.

Not with cannon fire.

Not with a shot at Fort Sumter.

But with deadlines and district lines, and governors signing paperwork like generals drawing battle maps.

And yes, it leads—eventually, inevitably—to the real thing.

Because what happens when blue states stop sending taxes to a red federal government?

What happens when governors of California, New York, and Illinois say, flat out, “We no longer recognize the authority of a president elected by gerrymandered fiat”?

What happens when National Guard units are federalized and told to act against their own citizens?

We’ve already seen it.

Federal troops in Portland.

Federal agents in unmarked vans in Minneapolis.

And now, a sitting U.S. president selecting military leadership based not on strategy, but on loyalty.

This is what a soft coup looks like.

This is how republics become dictatorships—one signed order, one packed court, one nullified election at a time.

We are standing on the edge.

And I want to be clear: I’m not even opposed to the collapse in principle.

Because unlike the Abbott crowd, I’ve thought this through.

If the United States breaks apart—and God knows, we are dangling over that edge like Wile E. Coyote holding a stick of TNT—here is what happens next:

California, Oregon, Washington, Nevada—the spine of the West—will form a new nation.

They will be joined by Illinois, Michigan, New York, Massachusetts, and most of the northeastern corridor.

The population, economy, and military of this new Union will be vastly superior to anything the southern rump states can cobble together.

And yes, you can wave your little Wyoming flags, but the brutal math is this: once the U.S. Constitution is abandoned, so too is the notion that two Dakotas matter more than one California.

In the new post-America, power will come from population, productivity, and force projection.

Which means: the south is screwed.

The GOP’s strongholds—Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Texas—are welfare states, net takers, dependent on federal subsidies from blue states they now propose to dominate.

They are a red velvet cake of hypocrisy baked in a kitchen paid for by liberal taxpayers.

And when those subsidies stop?

When Social Security checks don’t arrive?

When FEMA aid dries up?

When food assistance vanishes?

These states will burn—not from outside invasion, but from within.

Poor white voters, duped into culture war hysteria, will finally realize that racism doesn’t pay the rent.

And when the AC breaks, when the grocery shelves are bare, when the insulin is gone—they will riot.

The next Fort Sumter won’t be fired upon by blue coats—it’ll be torched from the inside by red ones who realize too late they were cannon fodder for a billionaire death cult.

Meanwhile, the new blue nation—call it Pacifica, call it the North American Republic, call it literally anything else—will control the nukes.

Because those bases are in California.

Those silos are in Montana and the Dakotas.

Those subs are docked in blue harbors, crewed by people with graduate degrees and no patience for neo-Confederate cosplay.

There may be some holdouts—some nukes in Texas, maybe a stray missile in Florida—but the command structure will fracture.

And the moment loyalty is divided in a nuclear state, you no longer have a country.

You have a disaster waiting for a launch code.

And you can bet NATO and the EU are watching.

So is China. So is Russia.

The new blue state will ally with Europe overnight.

The new red state?

It will be isolated.

Economically neutered.

Morally bankrupt. Internationally shunned.

Try running a nation with no money, no allies, and a citizenry trained only in rage. Let’s see how that goes.

And yet—and yet—this is where we are headed.

Because for too long, one side has played by the rules while the other sharpens the knives.

We have tried to compromise with arsonists.

We have let the Constitution become a suicide pact.

No more.

Because now, if we do not fight, we die.

If we play fair, we lose.

If we tell ourselves it can’t happen here, we will wake up in the ash of what once was.

Greg Abbott is trying to fire on Fort Sumter with a fountain pen and a smirk.

If we don’t match him force for force—not violence for violence, but action for action, map for map, court for court, and yes, goddamnit, declaration for declaration—then the next fight won’t be about democracy.

It will be about which side gets the tanks.

And you know what?

I say let it come.

Because I promise you: the right has not thought this through.

They think blue states are weak.

That liberal means soft.

That cities can’t fight.

But I’ve seen New Yorkers when the train’s late.

I’ve seen Californians during wildfires.

I’ve seen drag queens in Texas standing alone against armed mobs and not blinking.

You want to go to war with those people?

Be my guest.

Just don’t be surprised when they’re still standing and you’re neck-deep in the mud, wondering why the federal aid convoy never came.

Let me say it again: this is a technical civil war.

The only question left is whether it becomes a real one.

Whether maps give way to bullets.

Whether executive orders become execution orders.

And if that day comes, the outcome is not assured.

But the blame will be.

It will rest on the heads of men like Trump, like Abbott, like the perjured judges and the cowardly Senators and the hollow-eyed billionaires who looked at democracy and said, “That’s too risky—let’s buy it instead.”

But history has long arms.

And the schoolchildren they’re so terrified of?

The ones they think will be traumatized by learning about slavery?

Those kids will write the textbooks.

And they will tell the truth.

They will say that the Republican Party, faced with the loss of cultural hegemony, chose to burn the country down rather than share it.

That the right feared democracy more than death.

That in the end, they didn’t win.

They ended.

Because power isn’t loyalty.

Power is legitimacy. Power is cooperation. Power is earned.

And no matter how many judges they install, how many maps they redraw, how many parades they throw for the flag—they cannot force a country to love them.

And the United States?

The United States is not one nation.

Not really.

Hasn’t been for a very long time.

Maybe never was.

We’ve called it “united” because no one had the balls to call it anything else.

But look closer.

Really look.

Not at the myth, not at the hymns or the fireworks or the golden parchment we put under museum glass and pretend still governs us.

Look at the actual nation.

The machine.

The bones under the makeup. You’ll see it’s already split.

We are a cold war in a hot climate, a long, drunken marriage where both spouses sleep in separate bedrooms, hoarding money and muttering fantasies of murder.

Half of this country prays for rain.

The other half curses God for not sending fire.

You think this is a phase?

A tantrum?

This is the logical end of manifest destiny and the Electoral College.

This is what you get when you marry thirteen slave states to thirteen merchant ones and pretend the vows were ever sincere.

You get a monstrosity: a country stitched together by compromise, half-built on genocide, half-built on commerce, full of contradictions so profound that the entire enterprise was always going to collapse in on itself like a house made of buried lies and termite wood.

And if you don’t believe me, ask the Cherokee.

Ask the Sioux.

Ask the Japanese Americans who had their homes stolen while they sat in desert cages.

Ask the Black soldiers who liberated Europe and came home to lynch mobs.

Ask the trans kids being hunted across state lines.

Ask the women whose bodies are now the property of governors.

Ask them if this was ever one country.

Ask a gay couple in Mississippi what flag they’re saluting when they’re denied medical rights.

Ask a Black teenager in Georgia if the Constitution applies when a cop pulls up behind him.

Ask a nurse in Arizona who makes $38,000 a year and can’t afford insulin because her governor thought tax cuts for landlords were a moral obligation.

Ask the dead. Ask the poor. Ask the workers.

Ask the veterans.

This was never one country.

It was two—or more—pretending not to notice each other, because the lies were easier than the war.

But the lie is collapsing.

There is no social contract anymore—only contractual obligation.

There is no shared dream—only curated delusions, sold like corn dogs at a carnival no one wants to admit is actually a funeral.

The national anthem plays, and we’re supposed to rise, even though the flag’s draped over a coffin and the smell of decay is coming up through the floorboards.

What do you call a government where one party believes in nothing but power, and the other believes in rules the first party has openly set on fire?

You don’t call it a democracy. You don’t even call it a republic.

You call it hospice.

And hospice is where the United States now lives—quietly rotting, humming show tunes while the nurse tightens the morphine drip and checks her watch for the next coup attempt.

Because the old country—the one your parents pledged allegiance to, the one your grandfather swore oaths for, the one we were all taught to memorize and mythologize—that country is already gone.

The states don’t trust the federal government.

The Supreme Court is functionally a papal tribunal in robes, overturning majority will with smirks and footnotes.

Congress is a roach motel for lobbyists and performative lunatics, many of whom are openly preparing for a post-America America where the flag stays the same, but the Constitution is a ghost story told around campfires by billionaires.

And don’t give me the “but the military” argument.

As if the military isn’t just as fractured.

The military is not a monolith.

It’s a lattice of class tension and cultural divergence, a cross-section of a nation coming apart at every seam.

You think the Joint Chiefs will all salute the same president if both sides claim victory in 2028?

You think a captain from Oregon will obey the same orders as a major from Alabama if they both think they’re saving the republic?

We are one disputed election away from seeing Marine units on opposite sides of the Potomac drawing weapons on each other.

And don’t think they won’t.

We’ve trained them to kill.

But we didn’t train them who to follow once the flag splits in two and each side says it’s the real one.

That’s the thing no one’s ready for: there won’t be two Americas.

There will be twenty.

Twenty splintered visions of what the United States “really” is, each one armed and praying for the clarity of righteous bloodshed.

California won’t ask permission to secede.

It’ll just stop obeying.

Texas already pretends it’s its own country—hell, they teach their kids the Alamo was a birthright, not a graveyard.

And Florida?

Florida is the Bosnian wildcard in the whole damn deck.

Armed, enraged, half-drowning in its own hubris and sea level, it will burn and smile as it does.

Once the structure collapses—once the federal government becomes two rival groups of governors and officers and deep-state functionaries playing constitutional Calvinball, it’s over.

The nukes don’t matter.

The treaties don’t matter.

What matters is who controls the ports, who keeps the power grid on, who can move food and fuel and bullets across state lines.

There will be checkpoints.

Roadblocks.

Supply chains redrawn by governors who no longer answer to the Pentagon, because the Pentagon will be two buildings by then—one in D.C., one in Omaha, or maybe Austin, and each one claiming legitimacy over the other.

The South will remember its mythologies and try to rise again.

The North will remember its debts and try to collect.

Cities will become fortresses.

Rural counties will become militias.

Suburbs will become no-man’s-land.

And as all this happens, the dollar will collapse.

Don’t kid yourself: the global economy does not give a fuck about “We the People.”

They care about stability.

Predictability.

Trade routes and energy flows and the enforcement of contracts.

The minute they sense real domestic instability—not the threat of it, but the confirmation of it—the dollar goes down like a narcoleptic in a blackout.

And when that happens, the war isn’t theoretical anymore.

It’s material.

Because we don’t make shit here.

We import. And when the imports stop, the riots start.

You think Americans know how to wait in line for food?

You think anyone in this country has the patience for “rolling blackouts” or “fuel rations” or “shared sacrifice”?

No.

They will shoot the cashier.

They will torch the supermarket.

They will drag their neighbor into the street because someone has to bleed for the fact that their Amazon package didn’t arrive and their WiFi is down and the President is in hiding.

You want a preview?

Look at January 6th. That was the rehearsal dinner.

Look at Kenosha. Look at Minneapolis. Look at Portland.

Now multiply it by fifty.

Add drone strikes.

Add rogue governors.

Add National Guard units defecting based on Facebook memes and AM talk radio.

Add sheriffs with God complexes and militia ties.

Add cyberattacks from Russia, China, and every 20-year-old in Estonia with a grudge and a laptop.

Add nuclear weapons whose command structure is suddenly ambiguous.

Add diseases, real and manufactured, released to sow chaos by regimes eager to carve up the carcass of the American empire before someone else claims it.

Add fear. Add drought. Add fire.

Add lies.

And stir.

This isn’t a Tom Clancy novel.

This isn’t a prepper fantasy.

This is what happens when a government built on consensus loses its ability to consent.

We’ve been trained to think of civil war in terms of Gettysburg and Antietam.

But the next one won’t look like that.

It’ll look like Syria.

Like Yugoslavia.

Like Ukraine.

Like Lebanon in 1975, where Christian militias and Muslim factions and foreign powers turned one of the most beautiful countries on Earth into a graveyard that smelled of smoke and gun oil and the end of things.

The next civil war will be digital and tribal and sudden.

It will be declared not by Lincoln but by TikTok and Fox News.

It will be fought not on battlefields, but on highways and Wi-Fi and gas lines and court dockets and supermarket aisles.

It will not be brother against brother.

It will be neighbor against neighbor, algorithm against algorithm, drone against protest, truth against power, and power against everyone.

And in the chaos, people will scream for order.

They will beg for order.

And some strongman will appear.

He won’t be Trump.

He’ll be younger.

Sharper.

Hungrier.

A Tom Cotton or a Josh Hawley or some asshole we haven’t even met yet, raised in the bowels of corporate-funded think tanks and groomed for the moment America breaks.

He’ll offer “unity.”

He’ll offer “peace.”

And he’ll take what remains of the Constitution and feed it into a shredder made of applause and fear.

He will come, and we will let him.

Because Americans are not special.

We are not immune to history.

We are not chosen.

We are not different.

We are Rome in the 5th century, decadent and divided, watching the aqueducts crumble while we chant slogans and sharpen knives.

We are the USSR in 1991, holding onto a flag while the ground splits beneath us.

We are whatever comes next, and we are not ready.

And when it comes—when the sirens replace the debates, when the tanks roll down Main Street not as a parade but as a warning—some of us will remember what we lost.

We’ll remember the dream. The idea.

We’ll remember that once, however flawed and hypocritical and blood-soaked it was, the idea of America meant something.

It meant the possibility of self-government. Of progress. Of dignity.

It meant something more than flags and guns and courts packed with perjurers.

It meant the attempt.

And now we stand at the edge of that attempt.

And we are failing.

The United States was beautiful.

At moments.

In dreams. In songs. In potential.

But it was never unbreakable.

And the people trying to bend it are forcing it to break.

I never thought I’d live to see it.

But now I worry we all will.

So tell me…

Am I lying?

Image created by ChatGPT based on the title of this post.

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9 thoughts on “Technical State of Civil War”

  2. Jared Wise Screamed “Kill Them” at Cops on January 6. Now He’s in Trump’s Justice Department

    Mitch Jackson

    Aug 8

    I don’t get upset easily. But this? This crosses the line. And if you’re paying attention, it should upset you too.

    Jared Wise is not some guy who got caught up in the crowd. He’s not a fringe protester, not a confused onlooker, not a lost soul swept into something bigger than himself. He’s a former FBI supervisory special agent who spent over a decade inside the most powerful domestic law enforcement agency in America. He wore the badge. He took the oath. He knew exactly what the rule of law meant. And then he spit on all of it.

    On January 6, 2021, Wise walked into the chaos with his eyes wide open. He wasn’t shoved or dragged. He wasn’t tricked or manipulated. He stood in the middle of the Capitol attack and made himself clear. His voice is on the body camera footage. He screamed at police officers, called them Nazis, accused them of being the Gestapo, and then shouted three blood-chilling words no American should ever yell at law enforcement: kill them. Kill them. Kill them.

    This wasn’t in the heat of a scuffle. This wasn’t a figure of speech. This was a trained federal agent, out of uniform and off the leash, cheering on violence against the very people he once served beside. There’s no debate. No confusion. It’s on video. It’s in court documents. It’s fact.

    And today, Jared Wise works for the Department of Justice.

    He didn’t get hired to push paper. He didn’t land in a mailroom or on a maintenance crew. He was brought in as a senior adviser in a hand-picked Trump-approved internal unit known as the Weaponization Working Group. Their job is simple. Tear down anyone who investigated the January 6 insurrection. Go after prosecutors. Go after FBI officials. Turn the concept of justice into a tool of revenge.

    Wise isn’t in the background. He’s not in the shadows. He’s front and center, and the Department of Justice has called him a “valued member” whose contributions they appreciate.

    That’s not just absurd. That’s dangerous.

    You don’t have to be a Democrat to be disgusted by this. You don’t have to follow politics closely. You don’t even need to know the full story of January 6. All you need is a basic sense of right and wrong. A man who publicly called for the murder of police officers during a violent assault on our Capitol should never be rewarded with a position of power. Period.

    Wise was indicted. He faced charges. And then he was pardoned by Donald Trump this year, as part of a mass amnesty that wiped the slate clean for hundreds of January 6 criminals. Within months, he was walking the halls of power again, not as a cautionary tale, not as a lesson in failure, but as a trusted insider.

    This is the kind of appointment that tells you everything you need to know about Trump’s second term. It’s not about unity. It’s not about law and order. It’s about rewarding the people who served him, no matter what they did. No matter who they hurt. No matter how disgraceful their past.

    Jared Wise stood in front of police officers and incited others to kill them. Now he sits inside the DOJ.

    If you’re not angry, you’re not paying attention. If this doesn’t shake something in you, nothing will. This is not a policy disagreement. This is not a matter of ideology. This is a complete inversion of values.

    The Department of Justice should be a place of integrity, not a dumping ground for pardoned extremists. And the American people deserve better than this poison injected into the veins of their own government.

    Jared Wise is not a footnote. He’s a warning. He’s the product of a system that now rewards loyalty to power over loyalty to truth. And his presence inside the DOJ is a disgrace that should haunt every voter who ever believed in accountability.

    So here’s your question. If a man like Jared Wise can scream for police to be killed, get caught on camera, get indicted, get pardoned, and then get hired by the Department of Justice, what does justice even mean anymore?

    It means what we let it mean.

    Now’s the time to stop letting the worst people win.

    Mitch Jackson, Esq. | links

    Reply

  4. I’ve hated the reference to “homeland” since it snaked its way into the US political vocabulary after 9-11. Here’s why.

    Why I Flinch Every Time I Hear “The Homeland”This Nazi-Era Word Has No Place in American Government

    Mitch Jackson

    Aug 9

    I don’t care how many times it’s printed on official documents or blasted across press briefings, it still doesn’t sit right with me. Every time a U.S. official says “the homeland,” something in my gut tightens. Not because I don’t love this country. Because I do. Fiercely. But because I know where that word comes from, and it sends a chill down my spine.

    Let’s be clear: “homeland” wasn’t a thing in American political language until after 9/11. Go back and search speeches, documents, media coverage before 2001, you’ll find “America,” “the United States,” “our nation,” “this country.” But not “the homeland.” That changed overnight.

    After the towers fell, President Bush and his team began referring to the continental U.S. as “the homeland.” They created the Office of Homeland Security in October 2001, and by 2002, we had the full-blown Department of Homeland Security. Just like that, a new word embedded itself into the American psyche.

    And here’s the part that most people don’t talk about: the term “homeland” has some really dark roots.

    It wasn’t coined in D.C. It was imported, linguistically and culturally. In Nazi Germany, the word Heimat was used to describe the sacred, ancestral land. It was wrapped in nationalism, racial purity, and militarized protection. It was used to draw lines. To exclude. To justify surveillance, suspicion, and brutal control in the name of security.

    And now we’ve got it printed on letterhead and spoken from podiums like it’s always been ours.

    Look, I get that “homeland” was supposed to make us feel safe. Post-9/11 America was scared. We needed strong language. We needed to pull together. But somewhere along the way, the word stopped being a rallying cry and started sounding like something else. Like control. Like overreach. Like the government looking inward with suspicion instead of outward with confidence.

    Words matter. Especially words that governments use to define who we are and what we’re protecting.

    I’m uncomfortable with the term because I know history. And I’ve seen how quickly fear can be weaponized into policy. “The homeland” isn’t just a word, it’s a framing device. It says, “This is ours and we must defend it at all costs.” Sounds noble, right? Until it starts justifying surveillance, racial profiling, travel bans, and kids in cages.

    We’ve got to be more honest about the words we absorb. Not every term that makes us feel strong is rooted in freedom. Some are borrowed from playbooks that built regimes on fear and exclusion.

    I’ll always defend this country. But I’m never going to call it “the homeland” like it’s just some neutral phrase. It’s not. And the sooner we acknowledge that, the sooner we stop normalizing language that was never meant to be American in the first place.

    Let’s call it what it is: America. The United States. Our country.

    Not the homeland.

    That word doesn’t belong here. And deep down, you probably feel it too.

    Mitch Jackson, Esq.

    Reply

  5. Heather Cox Richardson

    Aug 21

    President Donald J. Trump created a firestorm yesterday when he said that the Smithsonian Institution, the world’s largest museum, education, and research complex, located mostly in Washington, D.C., focuses too much on “how bad slavery was.” But his objection to recognizing the horrors of human enslavement is not simply white supremacy. It is the logical outcome of the political ideology that created MAGA. It is the same ideology that leads him and his loyalists to try to rig the nation’s voting system to create a one-party state.

    That ideology took shape in the years immediately after the Civil War, when Black men and poor white men in the South voted for leaders who promised to rebuild their shattered region, provide schools and hospitals (as well as desperately needed prosthetics for veterans), and develop the economy with railroads to provide an equal opportunity for all men to work hard and rise.

    Former Confederates, committed to the idea of both their racial superiority and their right to control the government, loathed the idea of Black men voting. But their opposition to Black voting on racial grounds ran headlong into the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which, after it was ratified in 1870, gave the U.S. government the power to make sure that no state denied any man the right to vote “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” When white former Confederates nonetheless tried to force their Black neighbors from the polls, Congress in 1870 created the Department of Justice, which began to prosecute the Ku Klux Klan members who had been terrorizing the South.

    With racial discrimination now a federal offense, elite white southerners changed their approach. They insisted that they objected to Black voting not on racial grounds, but because Black men were voting for programs that redistributed wealth from hardworking white people to Black people, since hospitals and roads would cost tax dollars and white people were the only ones with taxable property in the Reconstruction South. Poor Black voters were instituting, one popular magazine wrote, “Socialism in South Carolina.”

    In contrast to what they insisted was the federal government’s turn toward socialism, former Confederates celebrated the American cowboys who were moving cattle from Texas to railheads first in Missouri and then northward across the plains, mythologizing them as true Americans. Although the American West depended on the federal government more than any other region of the country, southern Democrats claimed the cowboy wanted nothing but for the government to leave him alone so he could earn prosperity through his own hard work with other men in a land where they dominated Indigenous Americans, Mexicans, and women.

    That image faded during the Great Depression and World War II as southerners turned with relief to federal aid and investment. Like them, the vast majority of Americans—Democrats, Independents, and Republicans—turned to the federal government to regulate business, provide a basic social safety net, promote infrastructure, and support a rules-based international order. This way of thinking became known as the “liberal consensus.”

    But some businessmen, furious at the idea of regulation and taxes, set out to destroy the liberal consensus that they believed stopped them from accumulating as much money as they deserved. They made little headway until the Supreme Court in 1954 unanimously decided that segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. Three years later, Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas National Guard and mobilized the 101st Airborne Division to protect the Black students at Little Rock Central High School. The use of tax dollars to protect Black rights gave those determined to destroy the liberal consensus an opening to reach back and rally supporters with the racism of Reconstruction.

    Federal protection of equal rights was a form of socialism, they insisted, and just as their predecessors had done in the 1870s, they turned to the image of the cowboy as the true American. When Arizona senator Barry Goldwater, who boasted of his western roots and wore a white cowboy hat, won the Republican nomination for president in 1964, convention organizers chose to make sure that it was the delegation from South Carolina—the heart of the Confederacy—that put his candidacy over the top.

    The 1965 Voting Rights Act protected Black and Brown voting, giving the political parties the choice of courting either those voters or their reactionary opponents. President Richard Nixon cast the die for the Republicans when he chose to court the same southern white supremacists that backed Goldwater to give him the win in 1968.

    As his popularity slid because of U.S. involvement in Vietnam and Cambodia and the May 1970 Kent State shooting, Nixon began to demonize “women’s libbers” as well as Black Americans and people of color. With his determination to roll back the New Deal, Ronald Reagan doubled down on the idea that racial minorities and women were turning the U.S. into a socialist country: his “welfare queen” was a Black woman who lived large by scamming government services.

    After 1980, women and racial minorities voted for Democrats over Republicans, and as they did so, talk radio and, later, personalities on the Fox News Channel hammered on the idea that these voters were ushering socialism into the United States. After the Democrats passed the 1993 National Voter Registration Act, often called the “Motor Voter Act,” to make registering to vote in federal elections easier, Republicans began to insist that Democrats could win elections only through voter fraud.

    Increasingly, Republicans treated Democratic victories as illegitimate and worked to prevent them. In 2000, Republican operatives rioted to shut down a recount in Florida that might have given Democrat Al Gore the presidency. Then, when voters elected Democratic president Barack Obama in 2008, Republican operatives launched Operation REDMAP—Republican Redistricting Majority Project—to take control of statehouses before the 2010 census and gerrymander states to keep control of the House of Representatives and prevent the Democrats from passing legislation.

    In that same year, the Republican-dominated Supreme Court reversed a century of campaign finance restrictions to permit corporations and other groups from outside the electoral region to spend unlimited money on elections. Three years after the Citizens United decision, the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act that protected minority voting.

    Despite the Republican thumb on the scale of American elections by the time he ran in 2016, Trump made his political career on the idea that Democrats were trying to cheat him of victory. Before the 2016 election, Trump’s associate Roger Stone launched a “Stop the Steal” website asking for donations of $10,000 because, he said, “If this election is close, THEY WILL STEAL IT.” “Donald Trump thinks Hillary Clinton and the Democrats are going to steal the next election,” the website said. A federal judge had to bar Stone and his Stop the Steal colleagues from intimidating voters at the polls in what they claimed was their search for election fraud.

    In 2020, of course, Trump turned that rhetoric into a weapon designed to overturn the results of a presidential election. Just today, newly unredacted filings in the lawsuit Smartmatic brought against Fox News included text messages showing that Fox News Channel personalities knew the election wasn’t stolen. But Jesse Watters mused to Greg Gutfield, “Think about how incredible our ratings would be if Fox went ALL in on STOP THE STEAL.” Jeanine Pirro, now the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, boasted of how hard she was working for Trump and the Republicans.

    In forty years, Republicans went from opposing Democrats’ policies, to insisting that Democrats were socialists who had no right to govern, to the idea that Republicans have a right to rig the system to keep voters from being able to elect Democrats to office. Now they appear to have gone to the next logical step: that democracy itself must be destroyed to create permanent Republican rule in order to make sure the government cannot be used for the government programs Americans want.

    Trump is working to erase women and minorities from the public sphere while openly calling for a system that makes it impossible for voters to elect his opponents. The new Texas maps show how these two plans work together: people of color make up 60% of the population of Texas, but the new maps would put white voters in charge of at least 26 of the state’s 38 districts. According to Texas state representative Vince Perez, it will take about 445,000 white residents to secure a member of Congress, but about 1.4 million Latino residents or 2 million Black residents to elect one.

    In order to put those maps in place, the Republican Texas House speaker has assigned state troopers to police the Democratic members to make sure they show up and give the Republicans enough lawmakers present to conduct business. Today that police custody translated to Texas representative Nicole Collier being threatened with felony charges for talking on the phone, from a bathroom, to Democratic National Committee chair Ken Martin, Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ), and Democratic California governor Gavin Newsom.

    Republicans have taken away the liberty, and now the voice, of a Black woman elected by voters to represent them in the government. This is a crisis far bigger than Texas.

    When Trump says that our history focuses too much on how bad slavery was, he is not simply downplaying the realities of human enslavement: he is advocating a world in which Black people, people of color, poor people, and women should let elite white men lead, and be grateful for that paternalism. It is the same argument elite enslavers made before the Civil War to defend their destruction of the idea of democracy to create an oligarchy. When Trump urges Republicans to slash voting rights to stop socialism and keep him in power, he makes the same argument former Confederates made after the war to keep those who would use the government for the public good from voting.

    Led by Donald Trump, MAGA Republicans are trying to take the country back to the past, rewriting history by imposing the ideology of the Confederacy on the United States of America.

    But that effort depends on Republicans buying into the idea that only women and minorities want government programs. That narrative is falling apart as cuts to the government slash programs on which all Americans depend and older white Americans take to the streets. Today, with the chants of those protesting Trump’s takeover of Washington, D.C., echoing in the background, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller told reporters: “We’re not going to let the communists destroy a great American city…. [T]hese stupid white hippies…all need to go home and take a nap because they’re all over 90 years old, and we’re gonna get back to the business of protecting the American people and the citizens of Washington, D.C.”

    —

    Notes:

    https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/19/us/politics/trump-smithsonian-slavery.html

    https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/citizens-united-explained

    https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/13/business/stop-the-steal-disinformation-campaign-invs

    “Socialism in South Carolina,” The Nation, April 16, 1874, pp. 247–248.

    https://www.newsweek.com/fox-news-hosts-private-texts-revealed-lawsuit-bombshells-2116299

    https://time.com/7310875/texass-map-racial-division/

    https://www.politico.com/story/2016/11/ohio-injunction-trump-roger-stone-polls-230754

    Bluesky:

    thejenniwren.teamlh.social/post/3lwuaavezhc2u

    atrupar.com/post/3lwtvjaw3vq2a

    Reply

  9. Carrick Ryan (Facebook)

    There was a naive part of me that still believed that when Trump’s authoritarian inclinations became irrefutable there would be at least few principled supporters that would eventually raise their voice and acknowledge that he had gone too far.

    Maybe not even to denounce him, but at least denounce his overreach. If not for what he has done then at least for what he is threatening to do. Yet it seems the last of the conservatives to be burdened by their conscience had all been purged during Trump’s first term.

    There are no more John McCains, Mitt Romneys, or Liz Cheneys, who all steadfastly wore the arrows of consequence from the contemptuous king and stared down the scorn and fury to die their political deaths proudly on their feet. There are no more moderates left with the conviction to step away as they realise what this has become.

    His former Attorney-General, Secretary of Defence, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff all warned that US democracy would be at risk if Trump gained power again… their faint voices were barely heard from their enforced exile.

    I have long accepted that there are good people whose agreeance with Trump’s policies I cannot break. I can grapple with the consent many offer for his hard line on immigration, his economic anarchy, and even his anti-establishment masquerade. I don’t agree with them, but I can accept that a reasonable person might.

    I am not expecting a single conservative to reverse their deeply held convictions at this stage, I am not expecting anyone to surrender their values.

    Bit will not one of you stand up for your democracy? Will not one of you sacrifice the pursuit of your policy goals for the salvation of the Republic? If not now, when?

    When he refused to accept the results of an election?

    When he pardoned the rioters who stormed the Capital on Jan 6th?

    When he had any prosecutors that investigated them fired?

    When he pardoned those that defied Congressional subpoenas to protect him?

    When he ordered his Justice Department investigate his political enemies?

    When he fired the prosecutors that refused?

    When he purged the Federal Government and the military of anyone whose loyalty to him was not absolute?

    When he fired the Head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics because he didn’t like the statistics they reported?

    When he fired the Head of the Defence Intelligence Agency when they refuted his narrative on Iran?

    When he used the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) to dig up spurious “mortgage fraud” charges against his political enemies?

    When he signed Executive Orders targeting law firms that had investigated him?

    When he accused the former President of “treason”?

    When he ordered a military parade for his birthday?

    When he accepted a $440 million jet from Qatar?

    When he greenlit the sale of restricted semiconductor chips to the UAE only after they invested $2 billion in a Trump business?

    When he made more than $5 billion in untraceable crypto sales in just the first year of his second term?

    When he threatened to annex Canada, and Greenland, and the Panama Canal?

    When he cut funding to PBS and NPR because he didn’t like their coverage of him?

    When he used the FCC to target comedians who mocked him?

    When he threatened to revoke the licenses of news outlets that were critical of him?

    When he refused to release the Epstein files that clearly implicate him?

    When he built his own paramilitary force of loyalists that detained thousands without due process?

    When he sent the National Guard into cities against the wishes of local authorities, and threatened to do it to others?

    When his Cabinet made their constant humiliating sycophantic diatribes of cringe worthy praise in an effort to placate his fragile ego?

    Was none of that enough?

    This is not about Left vs Right. This isn’t about politics. It’s about democracy.

    I can say with supreme confidence that if a Democratic President did just one of these things I would condemn them. Where is your voice?

    If I’m honest, I am worried it might already be too late. But I know for certain that it will be if you wait any longer.

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